¶In closing I want to read a few verses from the Epistle of James, from the first chapter twenty-seventh verse:
¶“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted before the world.”
¶If a man will try to serve God the Father by being kindly to the many around him who need such kindness and by being upright and honest himself, then we have the authority of the Good Book for saying that we are in honor bound to treat him as a good Christian and extend the hand of brotherhood to him.
¶Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes what a very large number of people tend to forget that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally—I do not mean figuratively, I mean literally—impossible for us to figure to ourselves what this life would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards toward which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves. Almost every man who has, by his life work, added to the sum of human achievement of which the race is proud, of which our people are proud, almost every such man has based his life work largely upon the teachings of the Bible. Sometimes it has been done unconsciously, more often consciously, and among the very greatest men a disproportionately large number have been diligent and close students of the Bible at first hand.
¶Lincoln,—sad, patient, kindly Lincoln, who after bearing upon his weary shoulders for four years a greater burden than that borne by any other man of the Nineteenth Century, laid down his life for the people whom, living, he had served so well,—built up his entire reading upon his early study of the Bible. He had mastered it absolutely; mastered it as, later he mastered only one or two other books, notably Shakespeare; mastered it so that he became almost a man of one book, who knew that book and who instinctively put into practice what he had been taught therein; and he left his life as a part of the crowning work of the Nineteenth Century.
¶You may look through the Bible from cover to cover, and nowhere will you find a line that can be construed into an apology for the man of brains who sins against the light. On the contrary, in the Bible, taking that as a guide, you will find that because much has been given to you much will be expected of you, and a heavier condemnation is to be visited upon the able man who goes wrong than upon his weaker brother who cannot do the harm that the other does, because it is not in him to do it. I plead, not merely for training of the mind, but for the moral and spiritual training of the home and the church; the moral and spiritual training that have always been found in, and that have ever accompanied the study of this book; this book, which, in almost every civilized tongue, can be described as ‘The Book,’ with the certainty of all understanding you when you so describe it.
¶The immense moral influence of the Bible, though of course, infinitely the most important, is not the only power it has for good. In addition there is the increasing influence it exerts on the side of good taste, of good literature, of proper sense of proportion, of simple and straightforward writing and thinking.
¶The Bible does not teach us to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them. That is a lesson that each one of us who has children is bound in honor to teach these children if he or she expects to see them become fitted to play the part of men and women in our world.
¶If we read the Bible aright we read a book which teaches us to go forth and do the work of the Lord; to do the work of the Lord in the world as we find it; to try to make things better in this world, even if only a little better, because we have lived in it. That kind of work can be done only by the man who is neither a weakling nor a coward, by the man who, in the fullest sense of the word is a true Christian—like Great Heart, Bunyan’s hero. We plead for a closer and wider and deeper study of the Bible, so that our people may be in fact as well as in theory, ‘doers of the word, and not hearers only.’